How Facebook Groups sparked a crisis in France

I had an excellent time talking about social media with Kara Swisher and her precocious 16-year-old son, Louie, on the 300th episode of the Recode Decode podcast. To the hundred or so of you who signed up for The Interface seemingly right after listening — welcome! And let me know what you think.

***

Over the weekend, violence broke out in France, with more than 280,000 protesters fanning out across the country in what is known as the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. What started as a reaction against a hike in the country’s gasoline tax has metastasized into something uglier. More than 400 people have been injured across some 2,000 rallies, and one person was killed after being run over by a car. In CityLab, Feargus O'Sullivan attempts to describe a rather amorphous protest:

Unusually, the Yellow Vests is a grassroots mass protest movement with no explicit wider political agenda or links to existing groups. Having organized themselves via social media since May (when the movement was sparked by an online petition), the Yellow Vests have arrived somewhat out of the blue.

There is also no clear media consensus as to what they are protesting beyond the cost of gas. To some observers, the protesters are primarily angry about what they see as President Emmanuel Macron’s apparent indifference toward tough conditions for working people. To others, the movement is evidence of a middle-class backlash. Meanwhile, it’s not automatically easy to say whether the protest cleaves more to the left or the right.

Two weeks ago, more than 1,500 Yellow Vests-related Facebook events were organized locally, sometimes garnering a quarter of a city’s population. Self-appointed thinkers became national figures, thanks to popular pages and a flurry of Facebook Live. One of them, Maxime Nicolle (107,000 followers), organizes frequent impromptu “lives”, immediately followed by thousands of people. His gospel is a hodgepodge of incoherent demands but he’s now a national voice. His Facebook account, featuring a guillotine, symbol of the French Revolution and the device for death penalty until 1981, was briefly suspended before being reinstated after he put up a more acceptable image. Despite surreals, but always copious lists of claims, these people appear on popular TV shows. Right now in France, traditional TV is trailing a social sphere seen as uncorrupted by the elites, unfiltered, and more authentic.

Writing for Bloomberg (and quoting a French-language column I couldn’t read myself), Leonid Bershidsky argues that Facebook’s decision to promote posts from groups in the News Feed may have exacerbated the protests.

There’s nothing democratic about the emergence of Facebook group administrators as spokespeople for what passes for a popular movement. Unlike Macron and French legislators, they are unelected. In a column for Liberation, journalist Vincent Glad suggested that recent changes to the Facebook algorithm – which have prioritized content created by groups over that of pages, including those of traditional media outlets – have provided the mechanism to promote these people. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg thought he was depoliticizing his platform and focusing on connecting people. That is not what happened.

“Facebook group admins, whose prerogatives are constantly being increased by Zuckerberg, are the new intermediaries, thriving on the ruins of labor unions, associations or political parties,” Glad wrote.

I have never seen the kind of wanton destruction that surrounded me on some of the smartest streets of Paris on Saturday – such random, hysterical hatred, directed not just towards the riot police but at shrines to the French republic itself such as the Arc de Triomphe. The 12-hour battle went beyond violent protest, beyond rioting, to the point of insurrection, even civil war.

Reading the coverage, I’m reminded of Renee DiResta’s recent essay “The Digital Maginot Line,” which I first shared here last week. In it, she writes about how liberal democracies have proven more susceptible to the fomenting of violent political outrage than more authoritarian states. She writes about the American case here, but it’s just as easy to translate to the situation in France:

We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We seriously entertain conversations about whether or not bots have the right to free speech, privilege the privacy of fake people, and have Congressional hearings to assuage the wounded egos of YouTube personalities. More authoritarian regimes, by contrast, would simply turn off the internet. An admirable commitment to the principle of free speech in peace time turns into a sucker position against adversarial psy-ops in wartime. We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Think about how the Yellow Vests came about. A political decision was made, and discussed on Facebook. A small group began discussing it in groups. Algorithms and viral sharing mechanics promoted the group posts most likely to get engagement into the News Feed. Over the next few months, the majority of France that uses Facebook saw a darker, angrier reflection of their country in the News Feed than perhaps actually existed. In time, perception became reality. And now the Arc de Triomphe is under attack.

And group posts, you will recall, are one of Facebook’s most highly touted solutions to the social-networks-and-democracy problem.

Of course, at this point we lack the evidence that Facebook caused the Yellow Vests to organize. But we can say that what we saw over the weekend is consistent with other angry populist movements that we have seen around the world — many of them violent, and many of them organized on social media. And we can predict with some confidence that more such movements will appear in the world’s liberal democracies, with equally unsettling results.

Mehreen Khan reports that two European Union member states are proposing a 3 percent tax on digital ad sales rather than a broader tax on tech companies. Facebook and Google would be hit hardest by such a move.

Activist Omar Abdulaziz believes Saudi authorities intercepted private WhatsApp messages between him and Jamal Khashoggi, putting into motion the events that would end with his murder. The duo wanted to start an online youth movement in part to debunk state propaganda. But their chatter was caught by spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, according to this fascinating and chilling report from Nina dos Santos and Michael Kaplan. (NSO denies any involvement.)

The fact Abdulaziz’s phone contained spyware means Saudi officials would have been able to see the same 400 messages Abdulaziz exchanged with Khashoggi over the period.

The messages portray Khashoggi, a Saudi former establishment figure, becoming increasingly fearful for his country’s fate as bin Salman consolidates his power. “He loves force, oppression and needs to show them off,” Khashoggi says of bin Salman, “but tyranny has no logic.”

WhatsApp made honest-to-god TV commercials to tell people in India not to share scurrilous rumors online, Ivan Mehta reports:

The 60-second commercials, named “Share joy, not rumors,” will be aired starting today in 10 local languages across TV, Facebook, and, YouTube. The Facebook-owned company has slated the release of these films just before Rajasthan and Telangana state elections.

The ads tackle issues of forwarding fake news and posting shocking rumors on WhatsApp groups, and the need to verify dubious information received from unknown sources.

BuzzFeed publishes some of the opposition research ginned up by Definers about George Soros. On one hand, it is essentially f a factual document. On the other, it’s laden with bolded sentences, underlined phrases, and all-caps headlines — an utterly spittle-flecked document meant to convey the maximum amount of panic that a shadowy figure was working in the shadows to warp your reality. In addition to Definers, I mean!

“Members of the New York City Council will host a trio of hearings to grill city officials and Amazon.com about the closed-door negotiations that led to the tech giant agreeing to build its second headquarters in Queens,” Katie Honan reports.

The first oversight hearing will be held on Wednesday, Dec. 12, at City Hall, according to Mr. Johnson’s office. Members of the council’s economic-development committee will take an overall look at the Amazon deal.

In January, the finance committee will hold a hearing focused on the state and city subsidies promised to Amazon. The final hearing likely will be held in February and focus on the deal’s impact on Long Island City’s housing, transportation and infrastructure.

The editor of independent news site Rappler (and a personal hero) says she will challenge trumped-up charges of tax fraud that are being used to intimidate her and her news organization, Hannah Ellis-Petersen reports:

On Sunday night, Ressa confirmed to the Guardian a warrant for her arrest had been issued. On Monday morning, she surrendered to the authorities at Pasig city regional trial court in Manila and posted bail, which was set at 60,000 Philippine pesos (£900).

Speaking outside the courthouse after posting bail, Ressa said that “now is certainly not the time to be afraid”.

You know, the thing that was particularly jarring about the Soros issue is that when the Times story came out, Facebook was very defensive. Both privately and publicly: No, this isn’t us, we would never do anything like this. And then, you know, they do the news-drop right before Thanksgiving, that — hey, we actually did do this. As an employee, I had to do a double-take. Well, if you did this, then why are you only now saying that you did, and why would you tell your employees that you didn’t? That’s what contributes to lower morale inside Facebook. It’s what I said in the memo. It’s hard to advocate on behalf of a company that you feel is not doing the good in the world that you imagined it would. That is akin to black users’ disillusionment with Facebook. That disillusionment is creeping among their employees, as well. They’re feeling a little bit of that.

Zachary Small has the tale of an art historian whose Facebook account was terminated after an automated content filter incorrectly identified a sculpture as a human being:

Curator and art historian Ruben Cordova thought that Facebook was the perfect platform to archive the photographic materials equivalent to almost a decade’s worth of his research. He created a network of albums, links, commentaries, and comparanda online, sometimes using those resources for his lectures at universities and galleries. This abundance of scholarship even included materials necessary for Cordova’s forthcoming publication.

But disaster struck in the early morning of November 16. That day, Cordova received an upsetting message from Facebook: the social media company had permanently disabled his account due to an alleged violation of community standards banning sexually explicit content. And with that, Cordova lost access to 9 years’ worth of aggregated resources and materials.

Taylor Lorenz reports that resourceful teens have hacked together an events app inside of Instagram, portending the day when this will be an actual feature inside Instagram, leading teens to complain that the app has become too bloated, and leave for another app that has fewer features, where they will hack together a new events app:

Here’s how it works: When teenagers are planning a big party, they’ll sometimes create a new Instagram account, often with a handle that includes the date of the party, like @Nov17partyy or @SarahsBdayOctober27. The account will be set to private, and its bio will list the date of the party and sometimes the handles of the organizers. Sometimes it will include stipulations—for example, if it follows you, or approves your follow request, you’re invited.

“Everyone uses social media as a form of validation for the parties, and no one knows the address to the house until they post it an hour before it starts,” Christian Brown, a 19-year-old student, says. “That’s the best way to get people talking.”

Last week, the Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board asked visitors to stop geotagging photographs on social media in an effort to protect the state’s pristine forests and remote lakes. Explaining the campaign, Brian Modena, a tourism-board member, suggested the landscape was under threat from visitors drawn by the beautiful vistas on Instagram.

Delta Lake, a remote refuge surrounded by the towering Grand Tetons, has become “a poster child for social media gone awry,” Mr. Modena said in an interview last week. “Influencers started posting from the top of the lake. Then it started racing through social media.”

Cameo is an app in which celebrities can charge money in exchange for recording short videos in which they deliver personalized messages. Naturally, some white supremacists wrote out some coded hate speech for people like Brett Favre to perform, and when they found out they had performed hate speech they got mad.

In the attacks by incels and their allies, activists on Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan have created automated programs to streamline the process of identifying, reporting, and harassing their targets. One program, called the ThotBot, includes the profiles of more than 20,000 alleged sex workers from several social media platforms that include a link to a PayPal account. “Search for bios with paypal in it, if they get banned paypal takes ownership of all the money on the account and it inevitably will be taxed as well,” the creator of the tool wrote in a tweet. In a later message, he claimed that one user of his program reported more than 100 profiles to PayPal.

It’s important to remember that Google’s 2010 withdrawal of its censored Chinese search engine was provoked by Beijing hacking the inner sanctum of Google’s software — their source code repository — to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. Despite the obvious connection, Google’s leadership has entirely avoided clarifying Dragonfly’s surveillance concessions or addressing one of the main demands in a letter from a coalition of 14 human rights organizations. The letter implored google to “[d]isclose its position on censorship in China and what steps, if any, Google is taking to safeguard against human rights violations linked to Project Dragonfly and its other Chinese mobile app offerings.”

Christina Farr says she once spent 5 hours a week on Instagram. She quit cold this summer, and now life is better, she reports. (Notably, her decision to quit came after the introduction of an activity dashboard showing her how much time she was spending on social networks.)

Without social media, that pressure melted away. I started to enjoy life’s more mundane moments and take stock of what I have today – a great job, a wonderful community, supportive friends and so on. I could take my time and enjoy it rather than rushing to the finish line.

In short, I started to feel happier and lighter.

Here’s a widely shared thread from Matthew Ball arguing that Facebook has been a bad partner for publishers — but that publishers have known this for a while, and so continue to partner with the company at their peril. (Also: why isn’t this a blog post instead of 40 tweets???)

1/ The narrative around Facebook and web publishers continues to distort and polarize after each outlet encounters layoffs/shutdowns. Each one is tragic, with a real human cost, as well as a societal one. But a lot of this is normal, unavoidable and misunderstood

About an hour after downloading TikTok, the popular video-sharing app, I experienced a bizarre sensation, one I haven’t felt in a long time while on the internet. The knot in my chest loosened, my head felt injected with helium, and the corners of my mouth crept upward into a smile.

Was this … happiness?

And finally ...

Rudy Giuliani forgot a period in between two sentences on Twitter, inadvertently creating a hyperlink. Someone bought the domain to send a political message back to Giuliani, and I invite you to click through and see it for yourself.